A variety of laser-readable discs are played in conventional single-disc or multiple-disc loading trays in an office, home or university environment. Examples of laser-readable discs generally include a compact disc (CD), CD-ROM, digital versatile disc (DVD), DVD-Audio, DVD-Video, DVD-ROM, and the like.
The technology that allowed multiple-disc loading is a carousel mechanism capable of holding several CDs or DVDs, for example. However, a major shortcoming of the carousel mechanism required only one disc to be played at a time. In addition, the mechanical switching from one disc to another was slow.
These shortcomings were solved by storing the contents of the discs onto a computer hard drive in order to allow more flexible access to the contents and to facilitate faster disc selection. However, applications of the hard drive technology were not without its accompanying drawbacks.
In one application, for instance, an MPEG compression scheme is employed to reduce the size of the data files stored on hard drives for faster music selection, for example. However, this compression scheme results in an audible reduction in sound quality. Moreover, this application has no DVD capability.
In another application where an MPEG compression scheme is not employed, in order to improve poor sound quality, flexible access to the contents on the hard drive became problematic because of searching capability drawbacks. Here again, this application is not capable of handling DVDs.
Accordingly, there is an increasing need to be able to provide students, faculty, staff, professionals and any variety of users, with a multi-media system that allows, in part, content delivery via multiple, simultaneous, independent feeds from a single source without impairment of audio/video quality.